The present invention concerns an arbitration method and device for transmit mode access to the transmission medium of a distributed switching network.
The present invention applies, for example, to a multiservice distributed switching network adapted to switch traffic in synchronous circuit-switched mode and in synchronous or asynchronous packet-switched mode, the architecture of said network being based on a transmission medium time-shared between different stations, in which:
the transmission medium is synchronous and structured in frames in turn structured in time slots in turn structured in time cells, the latter being sized to contain a communication entity which can be either a circuit-switched cell or a segmented packet-switched cell,
an ideal (or nominal) time slot for access to the transmission medium in packet-switched mode is assigned to the respective stations communicating within the network,
in each time cell and for all stations transmission medium access arbitration is applied to procure access to this medium, in decreasing priority order, to circuit-switched cells available at this time in any station, to synchronous segmented packet-switched cells available at this time in any station having an a nominal access time slot anterior to the time slot containing the time cell in question, to synchronous segmented packet-switched cells available at this time in the station having as its nominal access time slot the time slot containing the time cell in question, to asynchronous segmented packet-switched cells available at this time in any station having for its nominal access time slot a time slot anterior to the time slot containing the time cell in question, and to asynchronous segmented packet-switched cells available at this time in the station having for its nominal access time slot the time slot containing the time cell in question.